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Searcher Intent: My Main Focus when it Comes to Keyword Research

This entry was written by one of our members and submitted to our YouMoz section.The author's views below are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz.

Keyword Research is one of the early stages of SEO and can easily be overlooked (or second guessed - i.e. assuming a keyword will be relevant, when it's not). A mistake at this stage can lead you to optimising for the wrong keywords, going after more competitive or lower-converting keywords; ultimately reducing the ROI. So how do you know what the right keywords are? Think searcher intent.

Word order is important. I had a client ask me whether word order made any difference -- I gave them the above example.

Searcher Intent is all about getting in the mind of the person that entered a particular keyword. What do they want ? Why did they enter words in that order? Once you make this part of your regular keyword research, you'll come up with keywords that other sites have neglected; getting you more qualified leads.

There are several aspects that I think about: first, whether a seemingly-obvious keyword could have other connotations or meaning. If you're optimising for 'jaguar' (thanks to this YouMoz post for that example!) for your blog on big cats, you're going to find you run into a LOT of competition from a certain Indian (who knew?) car manufacturer. The next thing I consider is, are my customers/readers/'whoever pays my bills entering that keyword looking for information? A product? Something else? If I'm working an ecommerce site, I'll focus my attention on the 'buy' keywords (more on those further down). If I'm SEOing a review site, I'll focus on the 'information' keywords, for example.

I look at words like 'review', 'shop', 'price', 'comparison', 'information', 'spec'. All words that, when added onto the end of a 'subject' word, signify what a searcher hopes to find from their search.

Once I have a list of words obtained from the Google Keyword Tool, I'll begin to think around those words. I'll add those 'intent' suffixes and prefixes to the keywords and think about what phrases people would actually look for. I'll use tools like Ubersuggest to find out what people are actually searching for related to the keywords that Google Keyword Tool gave me and come up with a new, improved list of targeted keywords.

A Ridiculous Example

Let's say you've got a client who runs a website selling gourmet coffee and coffee accessories. You're not going to optimise for the word 'coffee' because that would be ridiculous. But let's suspend reality for a moment, and consider why that would be ridiculous. It's ridiculous for two reasons:

1) Coffee is an incredibly competitive term - you have sites like Starbucks and Wikipedia dominating the SERPS - it would take huge amounts of hard work to get a site there.

I can't drink this. When I search for 'coffee' I want the location of my nearest coffee shop.

Image courtesy of http://www.sxc.hu/photo/664329

2) Who, when they're looking for gourmet specialty coffees and espresso machines, searches simply for 'coffee'? Even if you did (after some real SEO hard labour) get your client's site to #1 for the term 'coffee' it would be unlikely you'd get an especially good CTR or conversion rate for your niche gourmet coffee website.

This very simple (and obvious) example illustrates the importance of searcher intent. Assuming your client's KPI is a little more complex than just 'send me more traffic' (as well it should be); you should be much more inclined to go for a keyword that converts 30% of the time, but gets 25 searches a month, to one that converts 0.2% of the time but gets 3000 searches a month. It's going to be a lot easier to rank high for the former than the latter, and your client's conversion rate will go up - showing a definite sales increase.

What sort of keywords should I be optimising for then?

Staying within the realm of ecommerce SEO, look at the following keywords and how they change the intent of the searcher:

buy [product] - okay this one is obvious, you probably do this anyway.

[product] online - suggests searcher is looking for an outlet selling the product online, rather than just information.

[product] [size] - specifics are good - if a searcher is looking for a size, it suggests they're closer to buying.

These types of keywords will be a lot less competitive than [product] type keywords. They also have the advantage of showing a more-qualified searcher landing on your site

Other keywords to look out for include:

Model codes, product codes and other very specific information. If you can land a searcher on an exact model in the exact colour they're after, the chance of them buying shoots up. They're a lot higher quality traffic to get than getting someone who has searched for a generic term.

This is more than just a 'focus on long-tail search' advice post (or at least I hope it is). It's a conversation I have with clients who know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be useful. Those clients who already have keyword lists in mind, and are after a 'build links with this anchor text, now build links with that anchor text' approach - not the way I prefer to work.

Talking to them about searcher intent before I start is a good way of showing my knowledge of SEO. By which I mean, you're not going to start spouting off about canonical URLs, and rel="no-follow" links to show you know what you're talking about, as they'll probably give you a blank look. Talking about searcher intent, however, shows expertise that they can understand. It shows you understand their customers, and they can see that (hopefully) you know better than they do when it comes to SEO.

Nathan Amery carries out SEO for Pretty Klicks, a web agency based in Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland. He can be found on Twitter @namery, or writing the Pretty Klicks blog.

41 Comments

Fantastic post. As Matt's said above, "dog toy"/"toy dog" is a great example when it comes to client education on the subject.

I love your suggestion of niche-dependent words, too. That type of thinking could easily feed into PPC: if a keyword does not necessarily warrant an SEO page - e.g. if the search volumes are low - then it could be targeted (on [exact] match) via PPC with relevant ad copy and a relevant landing page. Depending on the visits/conversions, it could then warrant its own page for SEO purposes as well.

You touched on the very reason I enjoy SEO. Yes we can all understand and execute all the technical aspects of the field. What takes us a step further is diving into the psychology of the field. Understanding how people think is a big part of what we do (in my opinion anyway) and I enjoyed reading your thoughts on the subject.

I completely agree that user intent is crucial when choosing keywords. I always use Apple as an example. If someone searches for "apple" are they looking for the company or the fruit? And you make a great point about order mattering as well. "Toy dog" and "dog toy" are two very different things and you have to remember that when optimizing your site.

Thanks for a great post, I know I am repeating those above me but I don't think it can be repeated enough how important searcher intention is.

There is a lot of vanity with appearing for certain top level words and phrases which are really generic, but a slightly more specific intention driven keyword variant can result in significantly higher conversions!

Searchers intent is a very difficult subject in marketing, but it is really all about conversion. I totally agree that keyword research requires this state of mind, because a website saying to a customer: "here is exactly what you are looking for", instead of: "here is something similar", is not just ten thousand times better, but establish trust between you and your customers.

I love the overall idea of adding words with product name
that help you cater the people who are in the later stages of buying...

Keywords like buy, compare, online, model number, discount,
free shipping are the keywords that people normally use when they passed the
initial stage of the buying processes... the best part is gaining visibility
over these keywords can be lot easier then the product itself...

Thanks guys - for smaller businesses who perhaps don't have the budget to be be able to put in the time to rank for the bigger, broader keywords; these more-qualified, less competitive ones give a lot more bang for your buck.

Great post on something a lot of search marketers neglect. People fixate on the keywords themselves and often don't take the time to really stop and think what the intent of that keyword was. You can take it a step further and argue that intent could be influenced by the particular device they are using (mobile anyone?). It'll be interesting to see how the appearance of the SERPs changes as search engines are able to recognize intent in real time.

Hey Nathan,Great post about keywords and thanks for linking back to my post :)

I do have a question. You said for Ecommerce sites it's better to focus on words more into the buying process by adding words like "buying" to them. But I think your actually saying is that you should split your Ecommerce site into segments so you can adress the different stages of the buying process.

So a section for the "orientation" which is informatie based and less commerce based and another section which is more "buying" based. If you follow the buying process of a customer (just one of many models). It can ofcourse be more then 2 segments depending on your branche and products entirely. So you can actually guide your customer trough the whole process rather then waiting untill they hit the late stage.

I cracked up at your "Dog toy," "Toy dog" example. I once worked for a CEO who insisted that every product page on a large e-commerce site be optimized for all the same broad keywords. For example, she wanted every single specific brand and model of video projector to rank for "video projectors." What the site ended up getting was a lot of crap traffic and no conversions, for exactly the reason that visitor intent was never taken into consideration.Conversely, I had a really smart professor at Full Sail University who provided some real world examples of Adwords campaigns he was managing (at the time) for 1-800-Flowers. The campaigns were convertins at 25% which blew my mind. It was all because he approached his keywords and ad writing with the philosophy being that part of his task was to eliminate the wrong traffic by actually discouraging broad range or broad search click-thrus. One basic example would be to communicate to a potential visitor that the product might be a very high ticket item. That eliminates the bargain hunters.Great post. Thanks for writing it.

I have to admit though that I am a bit surprised no one has mentioned this yet: Google prefers exact phrase matches. And I don't mean that in the SEM sense. I have a client in Columbus Ohio that offers a service that is an alternative to renting a dumpster, yet they are buried in something like position 25 on Google (last I checked) because of dozens of non-local companies who have targeted the exact phrasing...one of the more prominent (and actually more robust) sites being found at this URL:www -dot- 1stopdumpsterrental -dot- com/ohio/dumpster-rental-columbus-oh

(I am not linking it, just being thorough by inserting the -dot- notation)

Intent aside, order of words matters because order of words matters to search engines, and exact or close matches of phrases are basically impossible to differentiate from a 'brand' name type of query, hence the proliferation of all those spammy sites that target nothing but exact phrase matches of commonly searched phrases.

Pretty much agree with you here. I have a website design company in Dundee and I also provide SEO for most of my clients. I do tell then that the people who are looking to buy their products will not simply type in shoes and buy their shoes and that they will have done some pretty decent research first about what they actually need and these terms must be incorporated in to the narrative of their websites. 99.9% of my clients dont really have a clue about SEO and search terms and they also really do prefer me to talk layman's terms with them. Makes life in the SEO world a little easier for client and SEO'r.

Nice post Nathan, I consider myself lucky when I pick up a client that's already utilized AdWords which allows me to use the Keyword Details section on keywords. That way you can see the actual keywords being used to drive traffic in CPC. Great points overall, I'll stop optimizing for the term "water" on my plumbing website now :)

Thanks for a brilliant post Nathan. A great explanation of why seracher intent is so important. There are lots of ways to find some of these long term keywords that convert.My favourite is scouring historical data in Analytics.

See what keywords people have been using to find you that have converted into users/customers

Analyse these keywords based on volume, competition and CPC.

Use these keywords to your advantage in a 'long tail' PPC campaign.

Can work really well, especially if you've got bucketloads of analytics data to look at. There must be loads of hidden gems in there that will create cheap, targeted and action-ready traffic!

I know that personally when I'm in the late stages of purchasing services and some products, I will often do these searches - I think they are usually pretty easy to rank for - just curious if these are in your standard batch of modifiers?

I'd have to question where you might place these keywords though. If it's optimising on a blog post then they might well have a place, but you wouldn't want to be optimising for negative words on products in the middle of an e commerce site would you?

It's often useful to optimise a page of content on your site for these words, explaining to customers why your products are genuine/authentic/high quality, to attempt to alleviate any concerns they may have.It's better that content that ranks for these types of 'bad' searches is on your site where you can control it, rather than on a review-site or an angry person's blog.So if you ran a website selling fashion items from big brands, you might have a piece of content on how to determine their authenticity, optimised for the word [brand name] fake

The most difficult part for me is searching the relevant
keywords for optimization. Your post has perfectly explained every thing. I agree with your staff and especially your
example is good “Dog Toy and Toy Dog”.

It's great to see some more light being shed on search semantics. I think this is still an underestimated (linkbuilding/social signals being the most overestimated) SEO focus area. With the advent of the semantic web or web3.0 I think we will see more and more of this stuff being interpreted by search engines themselves and translated into the best webpage. Obviously today, this is still highly relevant.

Thanks for the great post! I agree that keyword research is definitely more nuanced than simply assessing traffic volume and competition - trying to get into the mindset of a searcher may be less "scientific" but it can really help focus your attention further along the sales funnel.